It is reminiscent ofPierre Nora’s suggestion that physical objects and especially the written word constitute‘archival memory,’ a secondary or ‘prosthesis’ memory (Nora, 1989: 14).

my movie ticket anecdote: I have a box of movie tickets from over the years and just holding each one I can tell you about that day, what theater I went to, a lot of details that would be totally lost with a bunch of markdown files. I really think the physical card aspect is crucial

Francesco d'Errico has done much to advance our understanding of artificial/ external memory systems.

These may occur on rock walls, but were commonly engraved onto robust bones since at least the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic and African Late Stone Age, where it is obvious they served as artificial memory systems (AMS) or external memory systems (EMS) to coin the terms used in Palaeolithic archaeology and cognitive science respectively, exosomatic devices in which number sense is clearly evident (for definitions see d’Errico Reference d'Errico1989; Reference d'Errico1995a,Reference d'Erricob; d'Errico & Cacho Reference d'Errico and Cacho1994; d'Errico et al. Reference d'Errico, Doyon and Colage2017; Hayden Reference Hayden2021).

Right? You said... No, no, bullshit. Let's write it all down and we can go check it. Let's not argue about what was said. We've got this thing called writing. And once we do that, that means we can make an argument out of a much larger body of evidence than you can ever do in an oral society. It starts killing off stories, because stories don't refer back that much. And so anyway, a key book for people who are wary of McLuhan, to understand this, or one of the key books is by Elizabeth Eisenstein. It's a mighty tome. It's a two volume tome, called the "Printing Press as an Agent of Change." And this is kind of the way to think about it as a kind of catalyst. Because it happened. The printing press did not make the Renaissance happen. The Renaissance was already starting to happen, but it was a huge accelerant for what had already started happening and what Kenneth Clark called Big Thaw.

in human memory they call it external context um so we have 00:35:59 so the external context for instance is the the spatial cues and the other items that are kind of attached to the note right

Krapp argues that, despite its ‘respectablelineage’, the card index generally ‘figures only as an anonymous,furtive factor in text generation, acknowledged – all the way into thetwentieth century – merely as a memory crutch’ (361).2 A keyreason for this is due to the fact that the ‘enlightened scholar isexpected to produce innovative thought’ (361); knowledgeproduction, and any prostheses involved in it, ‘became and remaineda private matter’ (361).

We need a reliable and simple external structure tothink in that compensates for the limitations of our brains

As a result of extensive work with this technique a kind of secondary memory will arise, an alter ego with who we can constantly communicate.